That tone out scared the tar out of me in the middle of the night. A fire at Safeway, smoke alarm going off. Gee whiz, talk about a big fire for a little department. Then I did what you should never do, ASSUME. I remembered that they had a false alarm before this week so I waited in my nice warm bed for the chief to arrive and tell us if it was something or not. I mean I don't live that far away. I can stay toasty and let the firefighters go out in the cold.
Sure enough it was an alarm dysfunction. I was so glad, the store was closed but that still would have been a bad fire.
Always and I mean always have someone fix your alarm if you have a false alarm or it does become a routine call and that gets firefighters killed and slow responses. I am so proud of our fire chief that he kept it as an active fire until proven otherwise. Good job Chief Huff.
I remember once in dispatch we had an alarm at a business that always went off when the wind blew. Well it started blowing in the middle of the night and both city and county officers were in dispatch taking a coffee break at about 3 am when one of them said "well about time for that alarm to go off with this wind". Sure enough about 3 minutes later it went off. We all started laughing and they got up slowly to go to the alarm laughing as they went up the stairs. They had been gone about one minute when we received another alarm, this time a motion detector alarm inside the building.
I said "ATTENTION OFFICERS, this is a good alarm, we just had a motion detector go off inside the building, repeat a working alarm"
They caught two guys in the building. If we had not got the motion detector alarm we could have very well had a couple of dead officers as these guys were armed. Taught all of us that to ASSUME means you may die.
Alarms are dangerous when they become a regular occurrence and in fact many police, fire, ambulance now charge people for response to over 2 false alarms a year just to force people to get them fixed before someone gets hurt.
Thank God it was a false alarm but I sure hope it is the last one we get from that building.
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